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I know what you're thinking. It's that time of year where we all get together with our families and discuss how to remove an adapter from an etherchannel whilst it's in use by a Shared Ethernet Adapter (SEA). Sure, Granny has her opinions but they're outdated. So, in order that you can spend more time with your families and less time arguing over why there's a padmin shell (!), here's how you do it. This is a dual VIOS configuration. ent20 is the SEA ent14 is the etherchannel adapter (in this case it's a six port etherchannel) ent12 is the... [More]

This blog post came about after a customer had encountered a problem on AIX 5.3. The disk being imported is a floating SAN disk shared between servers on various frames. That is to say, there are multiple LPARs defined which use this disk. You simply deactivate one LPAR and activate the other. However, this can cause problems as Server A will have a record of the PVID of the disk that is in datavg but Server B will have a different PVID for that disk. I’ve probably not explained that very well so let’s take a look. Looking at the PVID... [More]

This is a subject that has been covered extensively elsewhere but I thought I’d share my recent experience as it did vary slightly. Chris Gibson (@cgibbo) put together an excellent Powerpoint presentation (with no terrible slide transitions) which you can find here . A customer recently asked me “what do you think of multibos?”. I had to admit it was something I didn’t had a great deal of experience in. A quick look through Google and we were ready to try it out on my test environment. In this scenario I’ll be updating from 7100-00-02-1041... [More]

Overview The PowerVM Virtualization Performance Advisor diagnoses performance issues within PowerVM partitions. The tool was developed by the IBM Power Systems Virtualization Performance team and is intended to help customers, developers, testers, performance analysts, field engineers and anyone else interested in diagnosing and addressing performance issues within the PowerVM partitions. The advisor runs within an AIX partition (dedicated or shared), analyzes performance characteristics, and provides a health check report. The user... [More]

Overview Sometimes disks will drop into the server in an unsatisfactory manner. That is to say, the naming of the disks will not be ideal. Let's look at neatening that up. A reliable way to avoid this is to shutdown VIOS1 and physically remove the disks that you want assigned to it. That way, there's no way VIOS2 can see them when you bring it up. Scenario You're working on a shiny new 9117-MMC in a dual VIOS (we'll call them VIOS1 and VIOS2) configuration. You've installed VIOS1 from DVD and are now installing VIOS2. You have already... [More]

Overview This page will show how to update the OS on the VIOS to a specific release. Scenarios where this may be needed are to bring a customer up to a supported release level, to fix an issue with an installed older release, or to bring two VIOS up to the same level. The latter reason is particularly important when working with Live Partition Mobility. Pre-Requisites Obvious things really; have the software downloaded from Fix Central and located somewhere the VIOS can access it from. A dual VIOS configuration is preferable as you can... [More]

We want to mirror the root disk across two physical volumes. Preferably, if the hardware allows it, you should also mirror across buses. Here's an example taken from a 9117-MMC: # lspv NAME PVID VG STATUS hdisk0 00c55384341c6e62 rootvg active hdisk1 00cd55a4ae6b676f None hdisk2 00c5538409a99b66 None hdisk3 00c553844356f733 None You can then use the lscfg | grep disk command to find the locations of the disk and therefore which disk... [More]